We've wrecked the school system by retiring early as teachers and demanding too much as parents. We've forced the country to accept funky-colored hearing aids because we're vain and can't hear a thing after going to too many Steppenwolf concerts back in the day when we were coddled teens.

Our generation gave you the last two presidents.

Enough said. Plus we boomers are a bunch of whiny
crybabies to boot.

We're the reason towns are building so much 55-plus housing there'll soon be no homes for anybody else.

We're even to blame for the stuff that passes for fashion these days. Look, back in some drug-fueled stupor, psychedelic swirls on polyester seemed like a good idea. Who could have predicted it would come back to haunt us 40 years later?

I guess we should have known.

From the time we were old enough to sit at a table, we've been killing off starving kids in India by refusing to eat our broccoli.

We've always been the reason for bad things.

But here's the deal. We're conflicted.

We grew up with the mantra not to trust anyone over 30, and now we're so far over 30 there's no denying reality. We are The Man.

That makes us feel like we've got the little Goofy angel on one shoulder and the little Goofy devil on the other. (Sorry. Boomer reference you wouldn't get unless you watched cartoons back in the '50s and '60s. And isn't that just like us to use an old TV reference and act all superior because we got to watch classics like ``The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis'' and you didn't?)

We want to be hip. We want to be relevant. We want our teeth to have no telltale signs of age, so we whiten up just like the 20-somethings. We color, nip and tuck on the sly.

But, Gen X, you're taking our jobs. And that isn't cool, man.

Don't get us wrong. We want to retire, but not in the puttering around the house sort of way. We want to retire in a tropical island sort of way.

The only problem is, we never thought this day would come. Or maybe our we thought our boring parents, those ones who never stopped talking about the Great Depression and the importance of saving things like rubber bands and paper clips, would bail us out.

Either way, we haven't done a bang-up job of saving for an umbrella drink sort of retirement.

Even if we did, we'd still feel conflicted. You see, we also grew up with this notion we could and should save the planet. Clearly, we haven't done a bang-up job with that one either.

We're not like our parents' generation. You know, the ones now known as the Greatest Generation, just to give us more of an inferiority complex, no doubt. They won World War II and made the world safe for democracy. After that, there were ``bad'' wars that didn't end well and didn't have universal support at home.

Our parents set the standards for suburban life.

Neighborhood barbecues. Cocktail parties. Making dresses from patterns in McCall's. Taking the 5 p.m. train home from the city, leaving plenty of time for family dinner and meting out discipline. Kitchen floors Mr. Cleaned to perfection.

And now, in their golden years, they're giving us more standards we'll never achieve.

Yup, I'm talking about that sex study released last week, the one showing Americans in their 70s and 80s are still going strong.

As if we need to hear that. Believe me, no boomer has ever wanted to think about their parents doing the horizontal mambo. Now we find out they're doing things we thought only Bill Clinton and prep school preteens did.

And only one out of seven men surveyed admitted to using Viagra to improve the situation.

Sheesh.

So our parents saved the world, made suburbia glamorous and are hot-hot-hot behind closed doors. Our younger siblings are pushing us out of our jobs. Our kids think we're fuddy-duddies. Our grandkids have stolen our clothes, taken our music and changed it all around.

Our biggest accomplishment seems to be unifying the other generations against us.